An embodiment of the invention is generally related to raising firefighters and equipment to, and evacuation of people from, the upper floors of a multi-story building during an emergency such as a fire. Other embodiments are also described.
When an emergency or disaster situation occurs in a tall structure such as a multi-story building, emergency personnel (such as firefighters and paramedics) are called to alleviate the disaster or rescue people trapped in the building. Nowhere has this been more horribly exemplified than at the World Trade Center towers in New York City, on Sep. 11, 2001. In that case, people were trapped in the upper floors of the buildings because of fires raging in lower floors. In addition, the emergency stairwells had become filled with smoke and hazardous gasses or had been rendered completely impassible due to debris. Although there were also people on floors below the fires, some of them might not have been able to walk down the emergency stairwell because they were injured. In short, there was a need for massive evacuation from and assistance to all of these upper floors. The term “upper floors” here is intended to mean those portions of a multi-story building that are above a base (e.g., the ground floor) of the building.
Because most of the upper floors were too high to be accessed from outside of the building using conventional firefighter ladders, emergency personnel had to walk up hundreds of flights of stairs (elevators are typically automatically shut down when there is a building fire). To make things worse, they had to battle the heat and smoke on the way up through the stairs, while carrying relatively heavy equipment such as oxygen bottles, medical kits, and other equipment needed to alleviate the disaster or assist the injured. Their progress up the stairs unfortunately was too slow in view of the rate at which the fires were consuming the building. Some of the emergency personnel may even have suffered heart attacks or smoke inhalation injuries while climbing the numerous stairs. It is possible that some of the evacuees, particularly those in the top most floors near the roof, might have been rescued from the building by an emergency helicopter that could land on the roof. However, this would still leave a significant number of people with no choice but to jump out of a window of the building to their deaths, rather than be burned alive or asphyxiated by the raging fires.
There have been several systems disclosed for use in rescuing persons trapped in the upper floors of a multi-story building. See, e.g. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,209,077; 4,919,228; 4,355,699; 4,424,884; and 4,406,351. Some of these systems use a platform or gondola that is suspended alongside an exterior face of the building by a cable. The platform is raised or lowered to a desired location next to an upper floor. Persons are then evacuated from that floor, and the platform loaded with the evacuees is then lowered to a safe haven (typically on the ground next to the building). However, these systems might suffer from a number of problems, including a relatively high cost of manufacture or maintenance as well as complex operation.